The NRL has a lawful path if it wants to bar Folau. Spiking a contract in the dark isn’t it

June 19, 2026 — 5:30pm

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

Five years ago, I wrote in these pages that it was confounding that rugby league should be the one Australian football code forced to wrestle with a hypothetical: how the NRL would respond if a club sought to register Israel Folau as a professional player. The hypothetical has aged; the confounding part hasn’t.

This week, it ceased being hypothetical. The Wests Tigers, coached by Benji Marshall, who by every account wanted Folau in his squad, were reportedly on the cusp of lodging a train-and-trial contract for the now 37-year-old. Then, apparently, someone on the Australian Rugby League Commission intervened, and the club quietly decided to lodge nothing.

This wasn’t the ham-fisted jibber jabber engaged in by St George Illawarra a few years back regarding the hypothetical possibility of offering Folau a contract. This was close to a real deal, apparently strangled only at the last gasp.

Folau isn’t the 31-year-old athlete of 2021. He’s now 37, with a Japanese rugby contract ending and apparently wanting to finish his career back where he started. Whether Folau is worth a roster spot is a football question and not one I would dare opine on.

That is not what killed this, however. What killed it, on the reporting, was the social media material that has framed the window through which he Folau has been considered since 2019.

Pick the single Australian athlete who, across the past quarter-century, has paired athletic excellence with such versatility, and you might land on Folau. To have played three football codes professionally is extraordinary.

None of that excuses his Instagram post in 2019 warning that homosexuals, among other groups, were destined for hell, which led to his termination by Rugby Australia. But it does mean the question of whether the NRL can fairly keep........

© WA Today